Names, brands, writing, and the language of commerce.

August 06, 2012

Dunning-Kruger Effect: A cognitive bias that causes unskilled people to mistakenly rate their ability as much higher than average. As Charles Darwin wrote in 1871 in The Descent of Man: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

The effect is named for David Dunning and Justin Kruger, social psychologists at Cornell University, who co-authored “Unskilled and Unaware of It,” published in the December 1999 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. … Paradoxically, improving the skills of the participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

Dunning got the idea to do this research from a news item he wrote read about a bank robber who believed that rubbing lemon juice on his face would render him invisible to surveillance cameras. (At least, that’s what he told the cops after his arrest.)

For their work in this area, Dunning and Kruger were awarded the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in psychology. The Ig Nobel Prizes have been presented each year since 1991 “to honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.”

The Dunning-Kruger effect is occasionally invoked in political contexts. (“Dunning-Kruger Sarah Palin” yields many examples.) The term came up just last week in the New York Times blog of economist Paul Krugman, in which Krugman discussedthe nonpartisan Tax Policy Center’s report on presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s tax plan. He concluded that the plan was “a Dooh Nibor—that is, a reverse Robin Hood.” The Romney campaign, Krugman wrote in an update, “responded with deep voodoo, invoking the supposed fabulous growth effects from his tax cuts.”

I’m becoming more and more convinced that, not only can the average Tea Partier not understand any of the math that goes into budget analysis, they deny that anybody ELSE can either -- even (especially?) experts with advanced degrees like Dr. K. These people really, honestly believe that math DOESN’T WORK; that nobody can know just how ridiculous Romney's numbers are. They assume we’re just being as politically motivated and as ignorant as they are themselves. …

It’s the Dunning Kruger effect, pure and simple. They assume, since the numbers have no meaning to them, that the numbers simply have no meaning at all. No amount of cogent analysis is ever going to pierce that veil.

Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life. And unknown unknowns constitute a grand swath of everybody’s field of ignorance.

June 18, 2012

“Dark money” is a new twist on “soft money”—unrestricted political contributions used by political parties to elect candidates. (“Hard money,” by contrast, is regulated by the Federal Election Commission and limited to $5,000 per year per contributor.) This sense of “soft money” has been around since at least the early 1990s. The first usage I found of “dark money” is in an October 2010 report by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to government transparency. The report, “Follow the Dark Money,” was published just before the midterm elections. It asserted in its first paragraph:

As much as $110 million has been pumped into the elections so far by political groups that have yet to disclose their donors, reports submitted to the Federal Election Commission show, and this “dark money” from unknown contributors has impacted 168 congressional races across the country.

That money flood was the direct consequence of a pair of 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decisions—Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission—that rewrote campaign-finance law to allow unlimited contributions from individuals, unions, and corporations as long as those expenditures were “independent” (not directly connected to a candidate or party).

The majority opinion in Citizens United stressed the importance of “prompt disclosure of expenditures” to “provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.” In practice, however, disclosure has been notably absent.

Mother Jones, the nonprofit investigative magazine familiarly called MoJo, picked up the “dark money” tag in 2011 and in April 2012 turned it into a regular beat covered by reporter Andy Kroll. Another reporter, Gavin Aronsen, writes the “This Week in Dark Money” post for the magazine’s Political Mojo blog. Mother Jones has devoted two issues, including the current one, to the dark-money theme.

MoJo’s co-editors, Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein, talked about dark money in a recent interview with Bill Moyers. At about 3:58, Moyers asked about the origins of “dark money.”

Moyers: What were you after there? Why that term?

Jeffery: We were searching around for a metaphor, and we had some celestial inspiration, as it were. Because like dark matter, which is something that’s in the universe and we know is very powerful but we don’t really understand it and we can’t really see it and we’re only beginning to be able to measure it– that’s true of dark money. Especially since Citizens United, there’s just so much unregulated, undisclosed money flowing through SuperPACs and their 501cs. To paraphrase [Arizona Senator] John McCain, very often we don’t know where the money’s coming from, who it’s going to, what its purpose is—it’s just out there. We can see the effects of it later, but we don’t know in anything close to real time what’s being raised and spent.

Dark money is “two-thirds to three-quarters Republican,” Bauerlein told Moyers. “Both sides can play this game,” she said, “but Republicans have an inherent advantage in that their natural constituency has a lot more money.”

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For more on 2012 campaign lingo, see my Visual Thesaurus columns published May 16 and May 23.

May 07, 2012

Wantologist: A coach who sells his or her assistance to people unclear about what they want. A blend of want and -ologist (“specialist”). Derived from Want-ology, a trademark registered in 2008 to Dr. Kevin B. Kreitman, “cybernetician & Renaissance woman.” (“That’s Kevin—just like the man’s name. And yes, I am female.”)

Here’s how the Want-ology website explains it:

To get what you really want, you have to know what you really want. Feel really secure that your dream job won't trap you in a nightmare. And feel confident that you can avoid jumping “out of the frying pan into the fire” when you decide to go for it.

Want-ologyTM is the fundamental course that will focus you on what you truly want in a way that will enable you to make your dreams come true.

In a new book, The Outsourced Life: Intimate Life in Market Times, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild examines wantologists and their kin: dating coaches, wedding planners, Rent-a-Grandmas, photo-album assemblers, nameologists (who will name your baby for a fee), and so on. This passage comes from an excerpt published in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Review:

After a 20-year career as a psychologist, Ms. [Katherine] Ziegler expanded her practice to include executive coaching, life coaching and wantology. Originally intended to help business managers make purchasing decisions, wantology is the brainchild of Kevin Kreitman, an industrial engineer who set up a two-day class to train life coaches to apply this method to individuals in private life. Ms. Ziegler took the course and was promptly certified in the new field.

…

Ms. Ziegler explains that the first step in thinking about a “want,” is to ask your client, “ ‘Are you floating or navigating toward your goal?’ A lot of people float. Then you ask, ‘What do you want to feel like once you have what you want?’ ”

…

Ms. Ziegler provided a service — albeit one with a wacky name — for a fee. Still, the mere existence of a paid wantologist indicates just how far the market has penetrated our intimate lives. Can it be that we are no longer confident to identify even our most ordinary desires without a professional to guide us?

Consider some recent shifts in language. Care of family and friends is increasingly referred to as “lay care.” The act of meeting a romantic partner at a flesh-and-blood gathering rather than online is disparaged by some dating coaches as “dating in the wild.”

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The very ease with which we reach for market services may help prevent us from noticing the remarkable degree to which the market has come to dominate our very ideas about what can or should be for sale or rent, and who should be included in the dramatic cast — buyers, branders, sellers — that we imagine as part of our personal life. It may even prevent us from noticing how we devalue what we don’t or can’t buy.

Hochschild is not the only author asking these questions. Michael J. Sandel, a professor of government at Harvard, has just published What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, which is also about what money can buy—a prison-cell upgrade and the right to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, to name just two examples. An excerpt from Sandel’s book appeared in the April issue of the Atlantic.

February 13, 2012

Uppertendom: The upper classes; the richest people in a city. From “upper ten thousand.”

This excellent word was coined in the 1840s, but I discovered it only recently in Speaking American: A History of English in the United States, Richard W. Bailey’s account of American English from 1600 through 2000. In the middle of the 19th century, Bailey writes, slang “rose into the usage of New York’s upperten—a shortened form of uppertendom—for the richest ten thousand citizens.”

According to the OED, upperten came first, in 1846 (“Major Peyton Florence was held in great reverence by the ‘upper ten’”—A. J. H. Duganne, Daguerreotype Miniature). Uppertendom (originally spelled Upper Ten-dom) first appeared in print in 1848. The journalist and humorist Mortimer Johnson, who used the pseudonym Q. K. P. Doesticks*, took it one step further in a piece published in an 1855 collection: “I did go to a ball for the benefit of the poor—a two-dollar commingling of upper-tendom with lower-twentydom.”

The OED’s final citation for uppertendom is dated 1887. I say it’s time for a revival. Uppertendom is more accurate than “the 1 percent”—the greatest wealth in the United States is concentrated in the top tenth of 1 percent—and it’s more fun to say.

A few additional tidbits from Speaking American:

Clout, in the political sense, originated in Chicago in the early years of the 20th century.

For more, read John McWhorter’s review of Speaking American in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. It contains this delightful sentence: “Bailey ventures peculiar conclusions that may be traceable to his having died last year, before he had the chance to polish his text.” Editing’s a little slapdash, too: I caught one instance of “flower” that should have been “flour.” But don’t let that keep you from reading the book.

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* “Q.K.” stood for “Queer Kritter.” Not unlike our current era, the mid-1800s were a boom time for playful spellings and abbreviations, the most famous of which remains “OK,” shortened from “oll korrect.” I wrote about the history of “OK” here.

December 13, 2011

In 1999, the American Dialect Society’s word of the year was “Y2K.” In 2007 it was “subprime.” Now that we’re almost finished with the current year, it’s time to ask ourselves: Which word best communicates the spirit of ’11?

I have my own suggestions both for an overall winner and for runners-up and special-category winners. The list appears after the jump; first, though, a bit of explanation.

Submissions need to meet only one of the criteria to qualify. Note, too, that “word of the year” is broadly defined as “vocabulary item”: it doesn’t have to be a single word. And because this is the American Dialect Society, words need to have been popular or prominent in the United States.

By the way, anyone can play this game. Check out the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year page to see how to submit your words via email, Twitter, or Facebook. If you’re planning to be at the society’s 2012 meeting in Portland, Oregon, you can participate in the voting at 5:30 p.m., January 5 6, at the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower.

And now for my list, presented in alphabetical order. Linked words have been featured in this space during 2011.

November 16, 2011

Is it time to rename the beleaguered Euro? The IPKat blog, which covers intellectual-property issues in Europe and the UK, wants your opinion. At this writing, voting is almost evenly divided among Neuro, BizMark, and Tenax (“Latin for frugal, grasping, obstinate and stingy”), but some of the runners-up are pretty clever, too: the Meou (“Memberstate European Operating Unit”), the Markel (a blend of the German mark and “Merkel”), the Ohno (no explanation required). You have till midnight (GMT) Sunday to vote. Via @igornaming.

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“Consider Tide detergent, Taizi, whose Chinese characters literally mean ‘gets rid of dirt.’ (Characters are important: the same sound written differently could mean ‘too purple.’)” – “Picking a Brand Name in China Is a Business Itself,” New York Times, November 12. Pinyin News begs to differ: “Nope. The Mandarin name for Tide detergent is Tàizì. On the other hand, ‘too purple’ would be ‘tài zǐ,’ which is close but not the same.” (Hat tip: Ben Zimmer.)

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I’m loving Word Soup, the new Wordnik series that covers “strange, obscure, unbelievable (and sometimes NSFW) words” heard on television. A few from the October 28 post: Apparition American (a euphemism for “ghost”), turfucken (“sex with ducks”), and volumptuous (a Snooki-ism that blends “voluptuous” and “lump”). And from November 9: Moneyed American (a euphemism for “rich person”) and jägerbar (a were-bear that hunts). Say, Wordnik, how about turning Word Soup into a book?

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Speaking of TV, here in the US we’re impatiently awaiting Season 2 of Downton Abbey, coming to PBS January 8, 2012. In the meantime, Oxford Dictionaries gives us a guide to the language of the series, which is set in England just before and during World War I. No spoilers, thankfully, but plenty of interesting word histories—and some anachronisms, like “when push comes to shove,” which was primarily used in the US until 1958.

Speaking of science fiction (not really), the Spaceage Portal of Sentence Discovery is a database of “interesting language patterns and elements,” including figures of speech, grammatical-syntactic structures, and “rhetorical maneuvers.” Search under the “clincher sentences” tag, for example, and read examples by Adam Gopnik, Todd Purdum, and Bill Bryson. Or: “Be of service to the universe by submitting examples that you yourself have discovered.” Fun and very, very useful. Via Sentence First.

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Do you believe it’s a cardinal sin to begin a sentence with a conjunction or end a sentence with a preposition? You are, in a word, wrong. Paul Brians, keeper of the indispensable Common Errors in English Usage website, has compiled a list of non-errors: “those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English.” Included: “over” vs. “more than,” “raise” vs. “rear,” “between vs. among,” and—of course—”hopefully” and “momentarily.” (The late William Safire called these non-errors “incorrections,” a label Language Log has adopted.)

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I rarely post links to advice about writing because so much of it is tedious, dumb, or both. J. Maureen Henderson’s “How to Improve Your Writing,” which was published in Forbes last month, is different: it’s smart, practical, and funny. (First tip: “Do more of it. Maybe.” Second tip: “Read more. Possibly.”) The best piece of advice in the column: Edit other people’s work.

Downtown Los Angeles once had streets named Faith, Hope, and Charity. “This last one, Charity Street, was a nonstarter. No one wanted to ‘live on Charity,’ so it was renamed with the grand title of Grand Avenue.” More on L.A. street names in L.A. Downtown News.

September 05, 2011

Touch labor: “Production (hands-on) labor reasonably and consistently applied to a unit of work.” (Source: BusinessDictionary.com.) Also called “direct labor.” The cost of assembly-line workers, for example, is classified as touch labor or direct labor, while the cost of supervisors, janitors, and security guards is classified as indirect labor.

In contemporary industry, touch labor is considered largely undesirable. South Dakota-based Craxel, for example, which creates “advanced infrastructure solutions that result in appreciable cost savings” for information-technology companies, lists “reduce touch labor” as its number-one value proposition:

Deploying and managing IT requires a huge amount of touch labor. The coming paradigm shift in computing will cause a dramatic reduction in the touch labor for installing, managing, and reconfiguring IT.

Touch labor is not included in the OED or in any of the major North American dictionaries. I first encountered it over the weekend—which, appropriately, is the Labor Day weekend here in the US—in “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult,” an article by Mike Lofgren published Sept. 3 on Truthout.org. Lofgren, a Republican, retired in June after serving for 28 years as a Congressional staffer; his article is a biting critique of what he calls the “political terrorism” of the modern Republican Party.

Here’s the relevant passage:

[T]he economic justification for Pentagon spending is even more fallacious when one considers that the $700 billion annual DOD budget creates comparatively few jobs. The days of Rosie the Riveter are long gone; most weapons projects now require very little touch labor. Instead, a disproportionate share is siphoned off into high-cost research and development (from which the civilian economy benefits little); exorbitant management expenditures, overhead and out-and-out padding; and, of course, the money that flows back into the coffers of political campaigns.

The Democratic Party and the media don’t escape Lofgren’s scorn, but he reserves his most withering attacks for his own party. Here’s an example:

Republicans have attempted to camouflage their amorous solicitude for billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric. [House Speaker] John Boehner is fond of saying, “we won't raise anyone’s taxes,” as if the take-home pay of an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up with whether Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income or at a lower rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are “job creators.” US corporations have just had their most profitable quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76 billion in cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the jobs?

Let’s get it over with and rename the holiday “Capital Day.” We may still celebrate Labor Day, but our culture has given up on honoring workers as the real creators of wealth and their honest toil — the phrase itself seems antique — as worthy of genuine respect.

July 18, 2011

Austerianism was coined from “austerity” with a possible hint of “hysteria” and a linguistic wink to the Austrian School of economics, whose 19th-century founders—notably Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises—were born in the Habsburg Empire. The Austrians’ theories about the subjective nature of economic value and diminishing marginal utility were further developed in the 20th century, notably by Friedrich Hayek, who, together with the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, was awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics. Austrian economics also holds that business cycles are “caused by distortion in interest rates due to the government's attempt to control money.” (Source: Investopedia.) Today, followers of the Austrian School are often associated with libertarian political philosophies.

Credit for coining Austeria and Austerian has been claimed by Rob Parenteau, who blogs about economics at Naked Capitalism and edits the monthly Richebächer Letter. (Kurt Richebächer was a member of the Austrian School.) Parenteau used Austeria in a June 10, 2010, interview with Business News Network (Canada). “I think they’ve renamed the Eurozone to Austeria now,” Parenteau quipped (at 3:17). He used Austeria and Austerian economics the following day in a Richebächer Letter article (link unavailable).

I found an earlier use of austerianism with a more microeconomic meaning, something close to plain old “thriftiness.” Shlomo Maital, a senior research fellow at Israel’s Technion Institute of Management, wrote in March 2008 about the resurgence of fixed-gear bicycles in cities from Dubai to San Francisco:

Fixed-gear 60’s bikes are part of what is known as the ‘austerian’ movement – austere is good, less is more, and do with cheap and simple rather than expensive, showy and conspicuous. Austerianism, in turn, is part of the new pro-environment green movement.

June 03, 2011

Pfizer’s exclusive patent rights to Viagra begin to expire next year, and the pharmaceutical company is taking what you might call prophylactic measures. This month the company will introduce generic Viagra in New Zealand under the name “Avigra”—an anagram of “Viagra.” “Avigra will be a fascinating experiment in branding and pricing strategy,” writes Bnet’s Jim Edwards, “and rival companies will observe it for clues as to how to compete when generic Viagra comes to the U.S. and other large regional markets.” Pfizer has also introduced a chewable form of the drug, Viagra Jet, in Mexico. (Hat tip: @AHundredMonkeys.)

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Preparing for its initial public offering, the real-estate website Zillow, founded in 2005, last week applied for a Nasdaq listing under the ticker symbol “Z.” If it’s approved, it will be the first one-letter Nasdaq symbol, but not the first use of “Z” as a stock symbol. That distinction used to belong to Woolworth, the five-and-dime chain that went out of business in the US in 1997. The New York Stock Exchange has almost an alphabet’s worth of one-letter stock symbols; here’s a list. (Pandora Media has applied for P, which was last used by Phillips Petroleum.) Related: “Ticker Shock,” my 2006 post about about the value of a memorable ticker symbol.

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Ford Motor Co. asked its 1.4 million Facebook fans for help in naming a new Mustang V6 performance package, and more than 3,000 of them went to work. The winning submission, “Mayhem Mustang,” came from Jeremy Marler of Charlotte, North Carolina. Unlike some companies that turn to crowdsourcing, Ford had the grace to compensate the winner: Mr. Marler will receive a three-year lease on a 2012 Mustang equipped with the Mayhem Mustang Package. (Hat tip: @WordLab.)

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Why is a telephone jack called a jack? “With all the making and breaking of connections, switch-pins wore out quickly. An early improvement was a hinged two-inch plate resembling a jackknife: the ‘jack-knife switch,’ or as it was soon called, the ‘jack.’” —The Information, by James Gleick.

For years, a team of computer scientists at two University of California campuses has been looking deeply into the nature of spam, the billions of unwanted e-mail messages generated by networks of zombie computers controlled by the rogue programs called botnets. They even coined a term, “spamalytics,” to describe their work.

Spam-based marketing is a curious beast. We all receive the advertisements—“Excellent hardness is easy!” —but few of us have encountered a person who admits to following through on this offer and making a purchase. And yet, the relentlessness by which such spam continually clogs Internet inboxes, despite years of energetic deployment of anti-spam technology, provides undeniable testament that spammers find their campaigns profitable. Someone is clearly buying. But how many, how often, and how much?

The Freakonomics blog summarized the team’s methodology in a November 2008 post that used “spamonomics” (of course) instead of “spamalytics”:

After taking over part of an existing botnet, the Berkeley team waged its own spam campaign, sending out almost 350 million pieces of junk e-mail over 26 days. By the end of their trial, they had netted a whopping 28 sales. That’s about one response for every 12.5 million e-mails sent, a conversion rate of less than 0.00001 percent.

In a new paper, to be presented tomorrow at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in Oakland, California, the team reveals that “95 percent of the credit card transactions for the spam-advertised drugs and herbal remedies they bought were handled by just three financial companies — one based in Azerbaijan, one in Denmark and one in Nevis, in the West Indies” (Markoff’s summary). The paper itself concludes:

[I]f U.S. issuing banks (i.e., banks that provide credit cards to U.S. consumers) were to refuse to settle certain transactions (e.g., card-not-present transactions for a subset of Merchant Category Codes) with the banks identiﬁed as supporting spam-advertised goods, then the underlying enterprise would be dramatically demonetized. Furthermore, it appears plausible that such a “ﬁnancial blacklist” could be updated very quickly (driven by modest numbers of undercover buys, as in our study) and far more rapidly than the turn-around time to acquire new banking resources—a rare asymmetry favoring the anti-spam community.